Ruislip & Eastcote & Northwood Gazette
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ROMANIAN glassmakers are particularly adept at making high-quality Gallé-style cameo glass but to avoid copyright issues, they are marked “TIP” in similarly raised glass after what passes at first glance as a Gallé signature.
We own such a piece, a lamp, purchased in Prague, which is stunning when lit… but unaffordable, to us at least, if it had been antique. TIP is the Romanian word for “type.”
The problem is that unscrupulous dealers have been known to grind away the TIP mark, which, when done professionally, leaves no trace.
Others attempting to explain away the mark claim erroneously that it indicated a piece made by a Gallé apprentice, or else it was made for export.
One of the most reliable ways of dating Gallé glass is the ground-out pontil mark on the base.
The pontil is a circular rough glass scar, which remains when the object is snapped off the glass blower’s hollow metal rod through which he blows to form the shape of the object when it is in molten form. The scar is then ground away, leaving a small dimple-shaped, smooth depression.
Most French cameo glass made before 1930 will have a ground pontil, while modern pieces made by the moulding process do not.
However, inventive fraudsters can create the ground-out depression simply to deceive.
As ever, the best advice is to buy only where purchases are guaranteed. footsteps at first. He was born in Nancy in 1846, the son of a prosperous ceramics manufacturer who also had a shop selling glassware. Initially, the young man trained in ceramic design, but moved on to experiment in glass in the 1880s. Early pieces were traditional, but at the Paris Exhibition of 1889, he showed his first attempts at cameo glass.
These were vases blown in one colour and then covered in glass of one or more different colours onto which was painted decoration in